“But what am I doing here? I am crippled, I don’t belong, I don’t fit with the intelligent, with the good looking, with the beautiful.” But he experiences GRACE, because the king comes and tells him, “You sit at the table anyway.”
Lo Debar is not a permanent place. It is a waiting place. How long can you wait? Maybe you too are waiting in Lo Debar. How long can you wait? Remember, the king knows where you are. Even Lo Debar is the place of grace. God is ready to pour grace upon you. I love the story of Mephiboshet because his story is my story. His story is your story. Sin has crippled us and we’re lame; lame in our talk (we stutter, we have an accent); lame in our motives (we do the right thing for the wrong reason); and yet God our King says to us, “You sit at My table anyway.” That’s grace. And one day we’ll sit at the King’s table, and our feet will be crippled no more, because he’ll make all things new.
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And now let me illustrate God’s grace with another true story from the New Testament. You know the story of the woman caught in adultery of John 8:1-11. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought to Jesus a woman caught in adultery. And to make this more dramatic, they do this when Jesus is at the temple. “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law, the JEDP historian — oh, I’m sorry, it doesn’t say the JEDP historian — it says, “Moses commanded us to stone, such women. Now what do you say?” Good question, but John tells us that their motives were marred by their shady spirituality. The Bible tells us that “They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.” And then he says, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first one to throw a stone at her.” And you know the rest of the story. “They began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left with the woman still standing there.”
In his book Six Hours One Friday, Max Lucado writes, “Jesus told the woman to look up. ‘Is there no one to condemn you?’ He smiled as she raised her head. She saw no one, only rocks — each one a miniature tombstone to mark the burial place of a man’s arrogance. Maybe she expected him to scold her. Perhaps she expected him to walk away from her. I’m not sure, but I do know this: What she got, she never expected. She got a promise and a commission. The promise: ‘Neither do I condemn you.’ The commission: ‘Go and sin no more.’”